


But we can do this so much better

by Philipa_Moss



Category: God's Own Country (2017)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, a happy ending obviously, a smidge of angst, families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 04:32:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14783645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philipa_Moss/pseuds/Philipa_Moss
Summary: “How can I convince you?” Gheorghe asked. “That I am staying.”





	But we can do this so much better

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Patrick Wolf's "Together."
> 
> I have wholeheartedly embraced the fandom convention of Gheorghe calling Johnny John. It delights me.

What happened first was that Martin took a fall, nothing serious but it meant that Deirdre was on high alert, snapping at everything that moved. Gheorghe hid his cheese in a string bag, attached to a rope, flung over a beam. By this point, Deirdre had reconciled herself to the stench in the kitchen, but she didn’t see the point of anything delicate these days, especially not soft tufts of dairy that oozed a bit when you cut into them. 

John came and went in his coveralls and Gheorghe did the same. John helped his father wash, then washed up after Gheorghe did the cooking, then fell face first into bed. He’d rouse when Gheorghe climbed in after him, either shifting to make room or reaching for Gheorghe’s cock, which happened more often than not, even now.

After Martin’s fall, Gheorghe caught John looking at the doorways like he’d like to knock them wider. Martin caught him looking once, too, and he said, “Don’t. Break. Your hand,” and Gheorghe said, “He’s right,” and John said, “Fuck off,” under his breath and went out to the barn. Later, he helped with dinner. He wasn’t very useful, always standing exactly where Gheorghe didn’t need him, but he had such a furious, downcast look on his face that Gheorghe let him stay.

After a few days, Martin started complaining of a twinge in his hip, which everyone seemed to realize translated to extreme pain. Gheorghe thought an ambulance was a good idea, but Martin said, “Don’t fuss,” so they ran him down to the hospital in the jeep, teeth grinding together at every jounce in the road. At the hospital, the doctor said, “Hairline fracture. He ought to rest it or he’ll need surgery,” and Gheorghe could practically see the words bubbling up in Martin. John said them instead, “What d’you think he’s been doing? Flying a kite?”

Deirdre sent him out of the room.

Gheorghe found him in the hall, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “Glad you’re here,” he said to Gheorghe before Gheorghe had even halfway reached him. There were nurses passing. John didn’t seem to mind. He said it again. “I’m glad you’re here.” And he laid a quick hand on Gheorghe’s shoulder. 

Later, at home and in bed, Gheorghe asked him what he meant.

“I can’t just be glad?” asked John.

“Of course you can be glad,” said Gheorghe. “But you don’t seem glad.” 

John sighed. His eyes darted to the darkest corners of the room and back again. “I don’t think I’m ever getting out of here.”

“Do you want to go?” asked Gheorghe.

“I don’t know,” said John. “I don’t think so, sometimes. What am I meant to do anywhere that’s not here?”

Gheorghe hummed against his hair.

“But I’d like the chance,” said John.

The second thing that happened was that Gheorghe’s grandmother died, and he had to fly home. By then, Martin was in less pain, was back out of bed and sitting upright, but not much else had changed. The barn sprang a leak, John patched it. In his spare minutes, Gheorghe poked away at a business plan for the cheese, but he kept getting called away.

He was working when the telephone rang. It was late, and Gheorghe had been at the farm long enough to know that the only people who rang were bill collectors and Deirdre’s sister, living somewhere down south. No one rang after nine, and it was going on eleven. John was nodding in and out of sleep on the sofa, but at the sound of the phone he was up with a jolt, muzzy and fumbling for the wall to go downstairs. Gheorghe laughed because John looked like a toddler, even though he didn’t feel like laughing, even though even then he knew it must be bad news.

John came back up again seconds after he went down. He looked strange.

“It’s your mum,” said John. 

And it wasn’t that Gheorghe and his mother didn’t talk, but they didn’t talk much, and when they did talk it was Sunday afternoon and his mother was missing him. He stood up. He didn’t realize John had followed him back downstairs until he was there holding the phone and John was hovering in the doorway, biting his nails.

In the end, there wasn’t much to say. His grandmother was dead. His sister, who had moved to town to be with her, who had met her husband there and had her children there, all while looking after their grandmother, was beside herself. Gheorghe had to come back—no more than two weeks, but he had to come back—for her. They’d already had the burial. There was no reason to delay.

Gheorghe agreed and hung up. John said something Gheorghe couldn’t understand. It took him full seconds to realize it was because John was speaking English.

It took a couple days to organize everything that had to be organized, and then John was driving Gheorghe in to catch the train. At first, John had been attentive, overly attentive, even. It was strange to be on the receiving end of so much attention, when Gheorghe was used to doling it out. He found that he didn’t like it much, this feeling of being handled with kid gloves. He thought he might like it more if it happened for no reason. If his grandmother weren’t dead.

On the morning Gheorghe left, John was back to a more familiar, sullen self. He snapped at Deirdre over breakfast and swore when the truck wouldn’t start on the first try. Once they were winding their way down into town, he was quiet.

“I’ll call you,” Gheorghe said, but John shook his head. “No reception,” he said.

“I will call you on the house phone,” said Gheorghe. John shrugged. 

They didn’t embrace in the car and then they didn’t embrace at the station and then Gheorghe was on his way to the airport and that was that. There was a gaping unhappiness somewhere in his chest and nothing he could do about it but leave. Leave and come back.

It was odd to arrive and stay in Bucharest, not to get on the train out to the farm. But Marilena had been living in the city for many years, and she was the one who needed him. Their mother would come in at the weekend, maybe. If she could.

“It’s good to see you,” said Marilena. She kept saying it, even after they got back to her apartment and Gheorghe greeted his nephews and brother-in-law and held his new niece and let her throw up on his shoulder. She wasn’t much heavier than a newborn lamb.

Gheorghe tried to call John for the first time that evening and got Deirdre instead. John was helping with Martin’s bath, apparently, and couldn’t come to the phone. Gheorghe called again the next day and got Deirdre again. The next day was the same. Whenever Gheorghe called, Deirdre was the one who answered. She was barely friendlier on the phone now than when she had been the first time, engaging Gheorghe to come up to the farm for a job, but she did always tell him to give his sister her best. Then she’d say, “Our Johnny’s up to his elbows in muck, can’t chit chat just now,” or something like that, no matter when Gheorghe called. The fourth time, half a week into staying at his sister’s apartment and sleeping on the floor in his nephews’ room, he almost hurled his phone against the wall. Instead, he took a deep breath and walked out onto the balcony to look at the view.

“What’s her name?” asked Marilena. She was sitting on the ground, back propped against the wall, smoking. She’d washed her hair, finally, and it was drying to fluff. Gheorghe sat down next to her.

“I thought you quit,” said Gheorghe.

“I’m done nursing,” Marilena said. “And I never smoke in front of my kids.”

Gheorghe sat down next to her. “You sharing?”

She twitched away from him. “I’m not the one living on some country estate.”

“It’s a farm. I know Mom showed you the pictures." 

“Still,” said Marilena. She squinted down at the street. “I asked you a question.”

“Yeah,” said Gheorghe.

“What’s her name?” 

It was a fair question, but after weeks and moths of living with the Saxbys and sleeping in John’s bed, Gheorghe was out of practice at seeing himself as anything other than what he was.

He took a deep breath. He glanced at Marilena.

She seemed to understand something, because she narrowed her eyes. “Gheorghe?”

For weeks in high school, everyone thought Marilena was a lesbian because she cut off all her hair and started listening to American punk music. That was what passed for a lesbian in their village back then. Maybe things had changed. Gheorghe shrugged. “His name’s John. He lives on a farm.”

Marilena gasped, then laughed at herself for gasping. She poked Gheorghe in the shoulder. “ _You_ live on a farm,” said Marilena.

“Yes,” said Gheorghe. “It’s the same farm.”

Marilena made a warm sound in her throat. She smashed her cigarette against the ground and looped her arm through Gheorghe’s. “Is he cute?”

Gheorghe shook his head. “I don’t know.” 

Marilena poked him again. “That’s not a great thing to say about your…” Marilena trailed off, waiting for the word.

“Boyfriend,” said Gheorghe, readily, though he’d never said it before.

“Okay,” said Marilena. “That’s not a great thing to say about your boyfriend.”

“It’s true,” said Gheorghe. “He is beautiful, though.” It was strange to be sitting and saying these things out here in the air where anyone could hear. There were people in the tower opposite. Some of them were making dinner. To say these things while staring into their miniature lives seemed risqué, too much and not enough all at once.

“Oh,” said Marilena.

“And stubborn,” Gheorghe added. He glanced over at his sister, who was looking at him like he’d won an award for a language he didn’t speak. She was smiling, at least. “He’s stubborn and I wish he would answer the phone when I call.”

But he didn’t and he didn’t. And Gheorghe knew that this was just John sitting in a room somewhere, convincing himself that Gheorghe wouldn’t come back, or would come back not wanting him. Knowing what was happening wasn’t the same as liking it, and if he could get John on the phone, he could tell him that.

It was tempting to stop calling because, now that she knew what was going, on Marilena kept sending him these sympathetic looks, and also because there was only so long a person could bang their head against a wall before it started to hurt. But Gheorghe kept rolling the dice. At least now Deirdre had stopped making up excuses. When he called, she just said, “Try again tomorrow,” encouraging and disapproving all at once. Gheorghe found himself missing her.

Marilena went back to work on Friday. “Just in time for the weekend,” Gheorghe said, and Marilena whacked his shoulder. By way of apology, Gheorghe offered to pick his nephews up at school. He didn’t for one minute think that Marilena would take him up on it, so it was with no small amount of surprise that he found himself attaching his baby niece to his front in a papoose thing. It took far too long to figure out how to wrap her up safely, and by that point he was late, so he ran down the street to the school with the back of her head cradled in his hand the whole way. When he stopped to catch his breath at a traffic light, he heard her making a terrible noise, only to look down and realize that she was laughing.

He texted Marilena from his phone, which actually belonged to her husband, but which Gheorghe was borrowing for the purposes of not being stranded with three children and no means of calling for help.

_Is she supposed to be making this noise?_

He attached a photo: the baby red with delight, Gheorghe with one eyebrow raised.

Marilena replied with a string of emojis Gheorghe had never seen before. 

_??_

She replied.

 _She likes you._  

On Saturday, the night before Gheorghe flew back, he didn’t call Deirdre. Instead, he sat with Marilena on the balcony and shared a bottle of wine.

“I was surprised, you know,” said Marilena. “When you said. About John.”

“Hmm,” said Gheorghe. Two glasses of wine in and the city had dulled to a gentle hum. He could almost close his eyes and imagine it was insects.

“I was surprised,” Marilena said again, “but I don’t think she would have been.”

Since Gheorghe had arrived, the most concrete reminder of their grandmother’s death was Marilena’s unspoken refusal to call her anything other than “she.” At first, Gheorghe had taken it to be the understandable anger that sometimes accompanied grief. With time, he started to see it as something else. It was an invocation, like the capital H in the divine He.

“She knew,” said Marilena. “She knew everything about us.”

“What makes you so sure?” Gheorghe asked. He tried not to sound skeptical, but he was. When he and Constantin left for England, they did so as friends. When they broke up, and Gheorghe dropped five kilos, none of his family was around to witness it.

Marilena shrugged. “Something she said to me once. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. She said, ‘Maybe in England Gheorghe will stop running.’ I thought she was confused.” Marilena chuckled. “Andrei’s brother was training for a marathon at the time.”

Marilena had barely stopped talking before Gheorghe was shaking his head. “No. No. She didn’t know. Nobody knew. I barely knew.”

“She knew,” said Marilena. She took his hand. “She knew.” Her face went blotchy and her eyes spilled. “And she’d be so proud.”

“You can’t know—” Gheorghe began, but Marilena had begun to sob, and so he pulled her close.

The next day, at the airport, Marilena shoved a thick manila envelope into Gheorghe’s hands. “For when you miss us,” she said.

He opened it in the plane. It was a photo album, full of scanned photos from when they were kids and some more recent snapshots of Marilena and her family. The last picture in the album was the one he’d texted her of him, sweaty, carrying his niece, grimacing for the camera.

Gheorghe pressed gently on his feelings, the way he might probe a bruise. He found that he was glad to be going back, as sad as he was to be leaving. Up there in the darkening air, he was homesick already, preemptively, for two places at once. He would have to come back and bring John with him. He would have to figure out how to make that possible. He would have to work on his business plan, start to sell the cheese, build enough of a cushion so that they could afford more than an emergency plane ticket.

Before Gheorghe left, he and John had agreed that John would track his flight and be there to pick him up at the station after a reasonable span of time. Still, part of Gheorghe was surprised to see him there, hunched over the steering wheel. His heart pounded as he crossed the street. He felt as shy as he’d ever felt around John. It was absurd.

Gheorghe flung his bag into the back and then climbed into the passenger seat. “Hi,” he said.

John barely looked at him. “Hi,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“How are you?” asked Gheorghe. 

“All right,” said John. He shoved on his sunglasses and wrenched the car into gear.

Gheorghe wasn’t proud of himself for joining John in his silence as they drove to the farm, but he was tired. The long layover in Amsterdam had shaved thirty pounds off his ticket, but left him hungry and creaky, like there was sand in all his joints. He closed his eyes to give them some rest, and the next thing he knew John was shaking him awake outside the house.

“You comin’ in or what?”

Martin and Deidre were already asleep. Out of habit, they tiptoed in, jostling against each other in the stairwell. Gheorghe bashed his pack against the wall and John muttered, “For God’s sake, give it here,” and carried it the rest of the way to the bedroom. 

Gheorghe stopped dead on the threshold. “What’s that?”

John threw Gheorghe’s pack down onto the item in question. “It’s a bed, what does it look like?" 

Gheorghe felt behind him and closed the door. “It looks new,” he said. It looked more than new. It looked big enough for the two of them. It looked like John had put the sheet and duvet on himself, because everything was crooked and careful. It looked permanent.

“Yeah, well,” said John. He stared at the floor.

“Well?”

“I wanted you glad, didn’t I? Glad to be back.”

“I am glad,” said Gheorghe. “Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

John sat down on the bed. He didn’t answer.

Gheorghe sat next to him. “Why didn’t you answer?” he asked again. Slowly, he reached out a hand and rested it on John’s neck. “I wanted to tell you about my family.”

“You can tell me now,” said John, slowly. “Now you’re home.”

Up close, John’s eyes were clearly bloodshot. “How are you?” asked Gheorghe, not moving his hand from John’s neck.

“You already asked,” said John.

“This time I want to know,” said Gheorghe.

They were both speaking so softly, as though they were in church, though Gheorghe hadn’t been to church in years, not even for Christmas. He wondered whether the Saxbys went on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He wondered whether he’d be expected to come along.

John sort of shuddered. He flopped back onto the bed and scrubbed him hands over his face. “At first it was just the phone,” he said. “I didn’t want to get used to it, like. Talking to you like that but not seeing you.”

“That’s stupid,” said Gheorghe.

“I guess,” said John. “Anyway, last night I went down to the pub.”

Gheorghe tried very hard not to let the ice in his spine show on his face, but John must have seen something there anyway because in a flash he was sitting back up. “Nothing like that. None of that. I wouldn’t— None of that anymore. But I did tie one on.”

“You got drunk,” Gheorghe clarified. It wasn’t an idiom he had heard before, but its meaning seemed clear enough.

“Yeah,” said John. “’M not used to it anymore, I guess. Puked so hard I cried.”

“Why?” 

“Missed you,” said John. He reached out, as if to touch Gheorghe, then pulled back.

Gheorghe rolled his eyes. He clasped John’s hand in both of his and pulled it to his chest. “You do not have to damage yourself to prove that you feel,” he said.

“Don’t be daft,” said John, but he leaned and rested head on Gheorghe’s shoulder.

The third thing that happened was that one of John’s old schoolmates opened a restaurant. Most of the people John knew from childhood fell into two categories: those who stayed and those who left. Those who stayed were mostly married farmers, with the exception of Audrey, who worked the Asda till and who stared her eyes right out of her head whenever Gheorghe came in with John. When Gheorghe shopped by himself, it was like he was invisible. That was the only real evidence he had for a theory long brewing: that he wasn’t the scandal. John had always been the scandal. Gheorghe’s presence had just thrown the scandal into sharper relief.

Gheorghe couldn’t even be sure what the scandal was, only that there was one, bigger and more amorphous than anything John could have done on his own. It had something to do with John’s mother, maybe, and her leaving. It wasn’t that Gheorghe thought the scandal was a secret or a crime or even one single event. It was that some people were by their nature scandalous, even when everything about them was some kind of ordinary. Even when it wasn’t entirely their fault. Even when they’d changed.

Alan had changed. He was the one who opened the restaurant, the only one of John’s classmates to fall into a third category all his own: left and came back.

Two weeks after Gheorghe got back from Romania, they parked and were walking to the pub when John stopped, peering down the street ahead of them. “Is that,” he began, but didn’t finish. Already, the blonde man up a ladder was climbing down and walking toward them.

Gheorghe knew the set of John’s shoulder and the look on his face. John lips were a thin line. He was chewing at the bottom one. He wasn’t sure of his welcome.

“Saxby?”

John moved away from Gheorghe, then closer again. “Collier,” he said.

The man, Collier, broke into a huge grin. He covered the remaining distance between them and pulled John into a vigorous handshake. “I heard you were still around,” he said.

“Where am I going to go,” said John. He took his hand back and indicated Gheorghe with a nod of his head. “This is Gheorghe.”

“Alan,” said Collier. The handshake he gave Gheorghe was less intense, but no less friendly. 

“Pleased to meet you,” said Gheorghe. 

“We went to school together,” said John.

“More like he did my maths homework, I promised not to knock him down on the pitch,” said Alan.

Gheorghe spent a moment puzzling over what Alan said, before realized that he’d heard it right the first time. John was good enough with numbers. It was just difficult to imagine him as the kind of child who would have agreed to such an arrangement. 

“Don’t look at me,” said John. “I’m busy enough with me own taxes.” 

“I do all right for myself these days, thank you very much,” Alan said, grinning. He pointed over his shoulder. “I’m opening that thing, aren’t I?”

Gheorghe now noticed that Alan’s abandoned ladder was leaning against a restaurant. The sign, newly painted, read, “Ella’s.” 

“Who’s Ella, then?” John asked. “Your wife?”

Alan laughed. “No. No. God, no. It was Simon’s mother’s name. Simon’s my partner.”

Gheorghe didn’t need to look at John to feel his reaction. The utter stillness in the street made every hair on Gheorghe’s neck stand up, though he didn’t know why.

“Surprise!” said Alan. “Bet you didn’t see that coming.”

“No,” said John, his voice flat. Gheorghe thought that might be all they got out of him, but John continued, “You want to be careful with that kind of thing around here. It’s not London.”

“No,” said Alan, coolly. He crossed his arms. “I didn’t think it was. Though the only person who seems to have a problem so far is you.”

“I don’t have a problem, mate,” said John, every word brittle enough to snap. 

It had begun to rain lightly. Gheorghe zipped up his coat. “We must go,” he said. 

“It feels like you have a problem,” said Alan, as if Gheorghe hadn’t spoken.

John scoffed. He came in closer to Alan, lowered his voice. “All I mean is, they’ll let you live, but they won’t let you forget it. I’ve been here my whole life.”

Alan’s eyes narrowed. He glanced at Gheorghe again. Then his eyes widened with new understanding. “Shit,” he said. He whistled.

“Right,” said John. “So I know what I’m about. This isn’t a fairy story, Collier.”

“Isn’t it?” said Alan, winking. His friendly energy was back. “Seems like that’s exactly what it is.”

John was visibly stunned. He looked around them at the street, as if to make sure the earth hadn’t shifted. This kind of easy joking didn’t come naturally to Gheorghe either, but it had to Constantin, and the friends Constantin seemed to attract like moths to a flame. John was out, if out meant behaving as though everyone knew, and open, if open meant something similar, but he had never known what it was like to live in the light.

“Everyone’s been very kind,” Alan was saying. “Eileen—remember Eileen?—her gran baked us a pie as a welcome to the neighborhood. Bernie Jackson told Simon where to find chanterelles. It’s really not the place it was.” 

“Right,” said John, dully.

“You’ve got to give people a chance, Johnny,” said Alan. “You and your man here should come for dinner some night.”

“That would be nice,” said Gheorghe, which seemed to awake John from whatever stupor he’d lapsed into.

“Great,” said John. “That’s dead nice.” He was smiling a false smile. He clapped Alan on the shoulder. “We’re off to the pub now. Good luck with,” he waved down the street at the restaurant.

“And you,” said Alan. He shook John’s hand and Gheorghe’s with a toothy smile and then he was off back down the street. 

John waited until he was out of earshot and then exhaled raggedly. “Christ,” he said. “I need a drink.”

In the pub, they got a corner table. When John came back with their pints he frowned. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’m not going to drink myself to death because some twat opened a posh restaurant.” He put the pints down and slid around to sit next to Gheorghe, close but not too close. 

“Was he right?” Gheorghe asked. “Have things changed?” 

John didn’t say anything. After a little while, he reached for Gheorghe’s hand under the table. “Dunno,” he said. “All that stuff about Eileen and the pie and mushroom hunting. It gets in my head, like. Like what if…” 

Gheorghe rested both their hands on John’s knee. “What if?”

“What if it wasn’t this. Being, um, bent and that. What if it was me all along they didn’t like?”

Gheorghe couldn’t answer right away. He was overwhelmed by the sorrow in John’s voice, the depth of feeling that carried with it everything he’d said and left unsaid before, about worrying that Gheorghe wouldn’t come back, about wanting the chance to leave even if he wouldn’t take it. 

“I like you,” said Gheorghe.

John blushed a little, on the tips of his ears. “You don’t count.”

“You’re wrong,” said Gheorghe. “I am the only one who counts.”

They went home early. John was quiet, but it wasn’t same quiet as the quiet after Gheorghe got back from Romania. John was thinking. He thought hard all the way home, gripping the steering wheel unusually hard.

Inside their room, John pushed Gheorghe up against the wall, kissing him then moving his mouth down to nip at the skin behind his ear. Gheorghe rested a hand on the back of John’s head, lazily ran his fingers through his hair. It was hard to believe there was a time Gheorghe had had to coax John into kissing. These days, he did it like putting on an oxygen mask.

John pulled back, a little breathless, his pupils big in the half-light. “Gheorghe,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Tell me what to do about the cheese. I want to help.”

That shocked a laugh out of Gheorghe. “Right now?”

John gave him a considering look, eyes ranging all the way down to the bulge in his trousers. “Maybe not now,” said John. He stepped closer, ran his hands up and down Gheorghe’s arms.

Gheorghe shivered. He’d never been with anyone else who got him going so quickly.

John was loud and quiet all at once. He didn’t talk much while they were having sex, only the odd practical question. “Would a pillow help?” “Do you need all that lube?” Once, a few months back, a question of logistics nearly veered into sweet, dirty talk. John brought his mouth to Gheorghe’s shoulder and panted, “Does that feel nice?” into it and Gheorghe came so hard his vision sparked. He didn’t give John time to act smug about it, just rolled him onto his back and blew him so vigorously John was close to pulling chunks out of his hair.

It was hard to tell, when they began, when rough would turn to sweet or sweet to rough. Tonight was no exception. John started by nearly fucking Gheorghe into the headboard, gripping his wrists and grinding them there. The next moment, he was holding him close and kissing his neck and making soothing noises. After, his wiped tears from his eyes.

Gheorghe pulled him closer. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” said John, exhaling. “Yeah.”

Gheorghe chose his next words carefully. John was less like the untamed horse he’d been when they first met but he still had his moments. “Are you telling me the truth?”

John sighed. “You’ll think I’m a prize idiot. Come on, shift yourself.” He shoved at Gheorghe to move up, then settled with his arm across Gheorghe’s middle.

“I won’t,” said Gheorghe, unsure whether John needed more prompting, or was just gathering his thoughts. “I have noticed that you seem…” Sad wasn’t the right word. John wasn’t sad. He was fighting sadness and anger back into their corner.

“Seem what?”

Gheorghe thought back. “Since your father fell.”

“Right?”

“You have seemed afraid.”

John tilted his head up to look at Gheorghe. “Fuck off,” he said, but there was no heat under it. “I do not. Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know,” said Gheorghe.

“Lot of good you are,” said John, settling back down. “Wake us up when you have something useful to say.” He closed his eyes. He would be asleep in seconds.

“How can I convince you?” Gheorghe asked. “That I am staying.”

John’s eyes opened into slits. He tightened his arm around Gheorghe. “Dunno,” he said, after a while. “You don’t know what going to happen. People shouldn’t make promises they can’t keep.”

“John—”

“I know, I know.” John pushed himself up so that he was leaning against the headboard. He pulled the sheets with him, draping them over his lap modestly. “Look, you say I’m afraid. I say I don’t know how to stop thinking of my life as shit. Even when it’s not. Everything can get taken away again. Just look at Dad. And your nan. And. And I just…” He gestured with his hands, pleading with the silence in the room almost before dropping them back at his sides. “When it happens,” he said to Gheorghe, “I don’t want to be surprised. So I’m watching out for it, like.”

John fell silent. Then he reached out to run a hand through Gheorghe’s hair. “I don’t like to imagine you gone. When you went back it was like you were in a black hole or summat. I didn’t know what you were doing. I couldn’t see you there.” 

“If you had picked up the phone,” said Gheorghe, “I could have told you.”

John nodded. He began to worry at the nail on his ring finger, speaking around it. “I stopped copping off in toilets and I stopped drinking. Don’t look at me like that. I stopped drinking as much. And I clean up around the place and all. I’m not a fuck-up anymore. Only...fuck.” John wiped his hand across his eyes. “I think my head’s still fucked up. Like maybe it always was.”

Gheorghe nodded. He pulled John close, smelled the just-washed, just-fucked scent of him, kissed his forehead. 

“That’s all right, love,” said John, his voice muffled against Gheorghe’s chest. “I’ll be all right.” 

Gheorghe realized he was shaking. He took a deep breath. “You call me what you call your cows?”

John frowned in confusion. Then his face cleared. “Oh. Well, I mean it, don’t I.”

“Oh,” said Gheorghe. 

“Don’t think I’d be so het up if I didn’t.”

Gheorghe nodded. He cupped John’s cheek. “I’ll take care of you,” he said.

“Okay,” said John. “Not if I take care of you first.”

So rarely in Gheorghe’s life had he been granted moments like this, moments of complete clarity. He would remember this when he was his mother’s age. He would remember this when he was seconds from dying. Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to tell his sister about it. 

“I want to show you something,” said Gheorghe, and he pulled back the sheet.

“If it’s your cock,” said John, “that’s not much of a surprise.”

Gheorghe flicked John’s nose and climbed out of bed. He dug around in his drawer until he found Marilena’s album then got back into bed with it.

“What’s this then?” asked John.

Gheorghe handed John the album. “Open it,” he said. “I want you to meet my family.”


End file.
